Posts Tagged ‘GMO salmon’

Now that the Food and Drug Administration has approved genetically modified salmon for human consumption, a timeworn debate over the safety and effectiveness of genetically modified food has once again resumed. Several lazy tropes drive this discourse—GMOs are “Frankenfood,” GMOs will feed the world, GMOs cause cancer—and none of them are true, which is, in part, what makes this revolving argument so frustrating to follow. But one phrase more than any other routinely gets tossed into the conversation like a grenade: anti-science.

The phrase feels good—there’s nothing more rhetorically satisfying than ejecting a dissenting view before the game even begins. But we need to stop using it to characterize those who disagree with a scientific position we support. For one thing, there’s nothing necessarily wrong with being anti-science, if only because science is neither a) an all-encompassing explanation of everything, nor b) an inherently virtuous phenomenon. For another, such a dismissal obscures the deeper reasons for being doubtful about GMOs (and vaccines and global warming and so on), reasons that can teach us a lot about how we incorporate science into a democratic society and monitor its applications

To condemn a person as anti-science implies that science is the intrinsically superior explanation for phenomena we encounter. But it’s not. Read more